Reason, Rights, and the Contradiction the Nation Kept

The idea

The Enlightenment reached America as a change of method rather than a loss of faith, and the writing of the period shows it. Where a Puritan read a fire as a judgment, an eighteenth-century writer reads a fact as evidence, and the characteristic forms follow: the almanac, the pamphlet, the essay, the letter, the autobiography and the public declaration, all of them addressed to a reader assumed capable of being convinced. Franklin is the representative figure, inventing a self in print, compressing prudence into aphorisms behind the mask of Poor Richard, setting out a chart of virtues in a bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection, and then admitting he never mastered some of them. Crèvecœur poses the question the nation has argued about since, asking what an American is and answering with a new man melted out of many nations, while quietly leaving out the people held in slavery on the farms he praises. Paine writes to be read aloud in a camp; Jefferson writes a premise, a right, a list of grievances and a conclusion, and produces the period's most consequential piece of prose. The contradiction arrives in the same career: the man who wrote that all men are created equal also wrote Notes on the State of Virginia and held people in bondage while doing it. The period's other writers press exactly there. Wheatley takes the Revolution's vocabulary of liberty and grounds it in her own seizure from her father's house. Equiano turns a childhood on a slave ship into the argument that ended a trade. Banneker sends Jefferson an almanac as proof and the Declaration as a reproach. Murray argues that the difference between men's and women's attainments is the schooling, not the mind. What the exam wants from this period is the pairing: the founding documents and the writers who held the founders to them.